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180
Lord Mahavira
Yasodhara Kaviyam are famous. These poems celebrate the incandescent virtue of ahimsa. Queen Vijayai speaks to her newlycrowned son Jeevakan about the importance of charity in the epic, Chintamani:
Give charity to the needy Cultivate a sweet temper The cart of this body when grown old Can never be repaired as new It will but go deep into the eddy That death is; it can never reach the shore. Ere this cart crumbles to pieces Drive it with a character honourable! Those born as men, when they live in avarice Forgetting charity, to spare even a morsel For the needy—their lives are in vain.
After discharging his royal duties for thirty years, Jeevakan renounces the world. He receives instruction from Jain 'ascetics. Man, if he did not control his senses and live a righteous life, could find himself punished in hell or condemned to birth as animals. Even rebirth as a human is fraught with tortures innumerable. Why, the very gods pray to Mahâvîra for salvation! Once Right. Conduct and Charity are cultivated, salvation will follow. The essentials of Right Conduct exhibited by Jeevakan (including Right Faith, Samyag darsana, and Right Knowledge, samyag jnana) hold true for us even today. In the words of Prof. M. Hiriyanna.
It is the ideal man that is the ideal of man, and there is only one way to achieve it-to strive for it in the manner in which others have striven, with their example shining before us. Such an ideal carries with it all necessary hope and encouragement; for, what man has done, man can do.
Mahâvîra's name brings back to us such an ideal man as a daily inspiration. Going a little deeper into the religion founded by Mahâvîra, we also realize that it has a contemporaneity in terms of practical application. In these days when people have begun to realise the importance of yoga and dhyana, Jainism provides a - strong base for such approaches to self-betterment. Ancient Jain writers like Subhachandra and Haribhadra have written in detail on the eight-stage progression in yoga. Sallekhana, the giving up
